Javier Martínez Cantó is a Ramón Areces Fellow and Visiting Scholar for 2023-2024 at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Previously, he held roles as a postdoctoral researcher at the Agenda Dynamics on Social Media project, hosted at IBEI, and with the research group of comparative politics at the University of Konstanz. In the 2022-2023 Winter Semester, he served as Interim Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Konstanz. Additionally, he is a member of the Quality of Democracy research group at IBEI and the University of Barcelona. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Bamberg–Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences, receiving the Juan Linz Prize from Spain's Centre for Political and Constitutional Studies and the Hans-Löwel-Preise from the University of Bamberg for his dissertation. His research explores the nexus of political representation, party politics, and the territorial distribution of power, with a focus on how personal characteristics of political elites interact with institutional settings to impact descriptive and substantive representation. His research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties.